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“I think the incompetence of this administration in the way they’ve handled these kinds of affairs, especially in the Middle East, is one of the worst aspects of this presidency,” Cheney said on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show Thursday. “If you’re a friend and ally of the United States in that part of the world tonight, you’d have to say what’s this guy all about? Can we count on anything he’s told us? … At the same time, our adversaries out there no longer fear us.”

Cheney said another failure of the administration was in Benghazi, Libya, and Clinton is avoiding responsibility for the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission there.

“She clearly wasn’t hands on, and now she doesn’t want to be hands on. And she’s doing everything she can to avoid responsibility for what clearly fell into her bailiwick,” Cheney said. “I think the Benghazi thing is one of the great — it’s not just an embarrassment, it’s a tragedy, because we lost four people that night. And what I always recall is her testimony saying, ‘What difference does it make?’ And the fact of the matter is it makes a huge difference.”

The vice president to George W. Bush also criticized Obama for the way he handled the capture of Osama bin Laden.

Cheney said while he was glad bin Laden was captured, the administration missed out on key opportunities because it wanted to declare victory too quickly and hasn’t acknowledged the 10-year intelligence gathering that made it possible.

“By going public the way they did, they lost, I am convinced, some opportunities,” Cheney said. “You don’t go out and broadcast the fact that you’ve got the guy. You want to take that intelligence and be able to exploit it over the next few nights, and wrap up large parts of the network. … They were in such a hurry to go out … and announce victory, that I’m convinced that they probably did not get maximum damage out of the intel that they had captured.”

Cheney is on a media tour to promote the release of his new book, which he co-wrote with his cardiologist about his long history of heart problems.

He has differed from Bush in criticizing the current administration, which the former president has refrained from doing.